Discovery
These first four perfect numbers were the only ones known to early Greek mathematics, and the mathematician Nicomachus had noted 8,128 as early as 100 AD. In a manuscript written between 1456 and 1461, an unknown mathematician recorded the earliest reference to a fifth perfect number, with 33,550,336 being correctly identified for the first time. In 1588, the Italian mathematician Pietro Cataldi identified the sixth (8,589,869,056) and the seventh (137,438,691,328) perfect numbers.
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Famous quotes containing the word discovery:
“We are all humiliated by the sudden discovery of a fact which has existed very comfortably and perhaps been staring at us in private while we have been making up our world entirely without it.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“The virtues of society are vices of the saint. The terror of reform is the discovery that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“He is not a true man of science who does not bring some sympathy to his studies, and expect to learn something by behavior as well as by application. It is childish to rest in the discovery of mere coincidences, or of partial and extraneous laws. The study of geometry is a petty and idle exercise of the mind, if it is applied to no larger system than the starry one.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)